Jessica Hatcher reflects on conflict reporting in South Sudan. News organizations want stories that will interest casual Western audiences — “as a former British foreign editor put it, readers get their daily fill of blood and gore from Syria” — and aid organizations struggle to keep global attention on the violence in both South Sudan and neighboring CAR.

Citing starving civilians and the Responsibility to Protect, Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi argue in a NYT op-ed for breaking the siege of starving Syrian cities “by any means necessary.” Postel and Hashemi’s assurance that “there are reasons to believe that the mere threat of coercive action would produce results” strikes me as an optimistic bit of hand-waving given the wide and very public opposition to the limited airstrikes — which were explicitly not “any means” — floated in the aftermath of the August gas attack.

ABOUT US

Barbara F. Walter is a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School. Joe Young is a political scientist at American University. Together, they edit this blog to provide simple, straight-forward analysis of political violence around the world.